Reflections on the TTF Class by Bailee Star

 Corps Project--Popplet and Wikipages:

As an Education Director, I've struggled with how to present our innovative pilot project.  Our project uses a Corps model, where we link a grade with a committee in order to learn about what the committee does as well as how, when, what and why they do it.  The families learn together along with older members of the congregation.  They're able to learn about our Jewish values through experiential means.

This visual organizer is an important first step in presenting the greater temple community with a flow of the work throughout the religious school.  Others can see the holistic nature of our work and the project will gain more visibility in the greater temple community.  I plan to use this visual organizer on our new website--perhaps placing video in the boxes as I get more documentation on the projects.

Here is the Popplet for the Temple Shir Tikvah Corps Project:

I made wikipages for three of the TST corps in the project as well. I plan to finish those pages as we complete other activities toward the end of the year. I plan to use the Popplet as an introductory page and hopefully link the wikipages in the individual popplet boxes. These would be on the website as soon as the material goes live.  I hope to make three more wikipages for the three remaining corps as well.  I would use this information to link from the grade-based information sheets that are sent to parents.  We usually use the first parent education session to tell them about the Corps project for their grade.  With this information distributed ahead of time online, we would use our family education time to learn each other's stories and develop relational bonds.

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+4th+Grade+Caring+Corps

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+5th+Grade+Tefillah+Corps

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+7th+Grade+Tikkun+Olam+Corps

My goal is to use the iPads frequently during weekday religious school.  Students are often exhausted when they come right from school and the iPads offer an attractive solution to differentiating learning and offering students an exciting way to access the learning material.  Most recently, the fifth graders looked for innovations in Israel as part of our Israel activities leading up to our Israeli Shuk day.